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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8619294" data-attributes="member: 18">DING DING DING winner!Yeah this has been like, increasingly a phenomenon since the 1990s. The first time I really saw it was with some World of Darkness adventure/campaign books, which really seemed like they were mostly about the writer telling a story, rather than trying to make a playable adventure. Apparently I wasn't the only one who thought this - I forget where I read it (perhaps in an article here, perhaps elsewhere), but one of the main White Wolf guys was continually annoyed by other writers focusing on their NPCs and their stories rather than making playable adventures which made the PCs the centre of things.Much as I've praised Paizo's Adventure Paths, I think they encouraged the phenomenon even further.Generally what I've found is the chances of a module being written to read rather than play is directly proportional to the length of the module. Short adventures? Like a few pages? Whilst they may have a showy plot, they're nearly always written to play. Massive campaign-length deals with really prominent NPCs? High odds that's basically written to read.And certainly it's not wrong to treat the market that way - most of the people I know who own tons of campaign-length adventures don't even actively DM! Some of them don't even actually play RPGs! But they read the adventures for sure.It's what, in 4E, caused me to stop buying adventures. I finally got to the point where literally the majority of adventures I bought made me do more work than it would take to just write my own adventure, because they were being written for people to read, not to actually run.See, if that's all an adventure is good for, to me, I feel hugely ripped-off and won't buy from that author (and maybe not that publisher) again. As you can imagine, I stopped buying WotC adventures because of this. I want usable material. I want massive time savings. Otherwise why am I giving you money? Ideas I have by the boatload. Time I sometimes do not. The idea in buying an adventure for me is I exchange my money for your time and effort. I'm not buying it to admire it!I've personally found tons in published adventures. 4E's initial trilogy (?) of official WotC adventures were wall-to-wall with confused, contradictory, or missing information. Were they badly written? Yes they were. I agree that DMs need to be able to handle basic stuff, but these were rife with weirdly missing info, and contradictions. In many cases you couldn't see the contradictions until you played the adventure, but then they became immediately clear, and the players noticed them. It's not just WotC either - another 4E adventure I bought from a 3PP had a delightful plot/concept but like the entire back half of the adventure was vague and unfinished-seeming, and the whole thing nearly got derailed because the PCs just said "Well that's obviously a trap" to one area of the castle it was set in and refused to enter.Back on the OP's point, i.e. adventures that don't give out pretty vital details or basic considerations, that does happen, but my experience has been much more that published adventures often:A) Directly contradict themselves.Especially where multiple authors worked on a project. The same NPC might be described two different ways, with very different attitudes or even abilities, for example. You might not pick that up on a read-through unless you're taking careful notes, and it is my view you should not need to take careful notes to run a published, paid-for adventure (free, sure).B) Have elements so nonsensical that it causes a problem and cannot easily be swept under the rug.4E WotC adventures were godawful for this. Players are curious and intelligent. We know this. Not sensible. Curious. They will pry into any mystery, and 4E's early WotC adventures were stuffed full of "mysteries" that were purely the result of bad writing, not the result of intentional creation of mysteries. Just lazy stuff like "Oh there's X monster in this room", even though it makes no sense, which was fine in like, 1984, but not so fine in 2008, when the adventure is trying to make out it makes sense and isn't just a random series of encounters lol.C) Present the PCs with a choice, where you can predict "adventurers" are basically going to select Choice A 50% of the time, but the adventure only works if the PCs select Choice B. "<a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButThouMust" target="_blank">But thou must</a>". It's like, don't put in a choice like that if you're not going to support it. I'd rather have a railroad than a false choice.This is one of my most-hated things published adventures, and it's pretty common. I've seen it really screw newer/less-experienced DMs, because they trust the adventure (the poor fools), and they present the choice, and then either they realize they're screwed because the adventure doesn't account for the obvious choice. One guy I know just straight-up ended a campaign because of this. I mean, was it a learning experience for him? Sure. Did he go on to be a great DM? Sure. But did he need to get a boot to the nuts from a badly-written adventure he trusted? No. (That was a WEG Star Wars campaign, IIRC.)Oh a sort of subset of this is adventures which are incredibly easy to "short-circuit" in an obvious way. Like, if the players just decide to get suspicious of a certain NPC early on, the adventure stops, and the entire logic of the adventure depends on this. We once had a CoC adventure end because one of the PCs just straight-up shot an obviously-evil NPC he didn't trust, and whilst we then had the adventure of "covering up a murder", the entire plot derailed because of it. Also covering up a murder in the 1920s was way easier than defeating Mythos stuff!I tend to put adventures out of my mind so I don't have immediate specifics but if they come to me (and they may), I will add them to the thread.</blockquote>

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